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Day: February 13, 2009

OK, so, what is the tool I was using earlier in the evening to get lots of responses from my Twitter followers and copy and paste them into my blog? Chris Pirillo’s Twickie.

How does it work?

I ask a question on Twitter.

People respond.

I log into Twickie. It lets me see the tweets I’ve posted. I click on a down arrow to see all responses.

I copy the HTML out of Twickie and I paste it into my blog editor’s HTML mode.

Real easy. Free. And demonstrates how you can use a crowd to do research.

Earlier tonight Chris told me it lets him write blog posts “backward.” See in the old world we’d write our opinions, then you’d comment. In Pirillo’s world you comment first, then he writes his blog post.

It’s a weird world and it’s Friday night, so I went with it and was amazed at the responses I got in just a few short minutes.

Thank you for participating. I’ll try other questions soon, I don’t want to overdo it.

Have you ever wanted to ask your Twitter followers a question, like what Twitter tool do they use on the iPhone, but wanted to aggregate all their answers into a single post? I did too. Here’s my first test. Literally four minutes ago I asked that question of my followers and here’s all the replies that came in in the first few minutes:

He might have a point. I’m seeing a bit more optimism in the valley. Yes, January was bloody. Yes, we’re still seeing layoffs, and probably will see a few more. Yes, our houses are under water (there are three houses on sale on just my small street and one of them is a foreclosure, so I owe more on my house than it’s now worth in the marketplace).

But I’ve been feeling more optimistic lately. At least about the Valley. After I got back from Davos I was really depressed. Why? Because I heard very few ideas about how to get people working again. But then I got back to the valley and met with companies like Playfish, which has been seeing great growth lately (they are the most popular games company on Facebook).

Also, this week we saw Intel invest billions of dollars in its US plants.

I just wrote a very long letter to Microsoft about what it must learn from BestBuy and Apple as it gets back into the retail business. I wonder if I nailed it? What would you tell Microsoft to do at retail to compete with Apple?

A ton of ideas on how I’ve seen people get creative again after a layoff. On Sunday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, admonished me and told me it’s very important to get back after a layoff and be optimistic again. Otherwise your work will suffer and people around you will see you as having less value.

He’s right, so I’ve been working on just that. Do you have any other ways you get optimistic after having a bad day at work?